Simulation Factory Interactive Debugging

The Simulation Factory provides a simple facility to interactively debug Cactus/Einstein Toolkit simulation sessions in parallel. Currently, only the Totalview debugger is supported.

Supported Machines

Interactive parallel debugging using Totalview is currently supported on the following machines:

• queenbee (LONI/TeraGrid)
• eric (LONI)
• ranger (TeraGrid)
• abe (TeraGrid)
• lincoln (TeraGrid)
• kraken (TeraGrid)

Getting Started

Before debugging, a Cactus/Einstein Toolkit binary must be compiled, and then a Simulation Factory simulation must be created. Instructions to do these steps can be found here:

Simulation_Factory_Advanced_Tutoria

A second requirement is the existence of an Xwindows environment such as X11 or X-Ming.

Interactive Sessions

To begin debugging, first launch an interactive session using The Simulation Factory. This can be done with the following command:

bin/sim interactive --walltime=01:00:00 --procs=8

walltime and procs can be changed to suit the amount of simulation time and processors needed.

Interactive Debugging

Once the queuing system grants an interactive session, it will present a shell on a compute node. From here, it is necessary to change the current working directory back to the simulation factory directory. Once located in The Simulation Factory directory, an interactive debugging session can be launched by typing the following command:

bin/sim run-debug <simulationname>

For instance, if your simulation is called "test_sim", it would be:

bin/sim run-debug test_sim

Once the interactive debugging session launches. It is necessary to hit the "Go" button inside Totalview to begin execution of the Cactus/Einstein Toolkit simulation.